Toey

©  2006  Rose George

was responsible for ladling alum and lime into bubbling brown sewage (bubbling beneath that hole). I know she was a woman because I stared at her chest.The sparkly earrings are no indication here. The machine was broken, they said, though it looked like it had never worked. A candidate for Crap Jobs. Or, Crap Toxic Lethal Jobs.

I was accompanied by Toey, a 22 year old management graduate who I recruited from from the Toilet Expo, where he was working temporarily. I asked him how good his English was, and he said, “well, I spent a year in the States” in a credible American accent. Hired. Except I hadn't told him he would have to visit a sewage works. I did as we waited for a driver to arrive who didn't (misunderstanding: one person in the municipal administration thought another would pick us up as a matter of course but forgot to communicate that to the other person). I also grilled him about all the things that have been puzzling me about Thailand. The yellow shirts. The orange Long Live the King bracelets. (They cost 99 baht from every 7/11 and the proceeds go to the King's charity). Whether it's OK for a farang to wear the yellow shirt (yes. Why not?). What it's like being under martial law. (”Fine. Same as before. It's like nothing happened. When it happened, it was like nothing happened. People went to the parliament buildings and had their picture taken with the soldiers and the tanks.”) The reason why Thais only use their first names (because they nearly all have different ones.). “When I lived in the US, I called everyone by their first name,” said Toey.

Gosh, I said, they must have thought you were very friendly.

Gosh, this is starting to read like an ad for HSBC. Wise. Old. Old. Wise.

Toey has a diamond stud in each ear and an extra small metal spike in his left ear. In Thailand, this apparently doesn’t mean he's gay, as I've seen lots of men with diamond studded ears. They could all be gay, or David Beckham, but I think they're neither. (I read today that one shrine has an effigy of David Beckham. If I weren't leaving tomorrow, I'd find it.)At a bus stop near the offices of Bangkok Municipal Administration, as we waited for a taxi, Toey said, “do you have ladyboys in England?” I said, “Some. But not as many as here, I don't think.” My incisive powers of investigative journalism had failed to notice that we were standing next to one, standing at a bus stop in a business district of Bangkok. I've never seen a man dressed as a woman in the City, for example. Wearing tight denim shorts. Toey says ladyboys are everywhere, and that sometimes they get shit because people don't like gays, and sometimes they don't. I'd forgotten that Bangkok is a world centre of gender reassignment surgery. As well as of dentistry, eye surgery and hip replacement, according to a half page ad in the Bangkok freesheet by a Midwestern American called Joe who was ecstatic with his new bones.

As we walked down the unlit lanes between Toey's compound and the road, he pointed out a temple on one side and monks' dormitory on the other. Or Sleeping Space for Monks. I said fatuously that the neighbourhood was blessed. “Oh no, people think it's spooky. Thais are scared of ghosts.”

Toey hadn't seen a ghost in 22 years. He was more spooked by me telling him that most of Bangkok's shit probably goes into the venerable Chao Phraya river. There's probably a reason it's packed with fish. And there's just no way that all of Bangkok's leavings can be properly treated. Toey took a while to warm up to the topic. Halfway through the tour, I'd said, “are you finding it interesting yet?”

Perched on a concrete slab with no protection from falling into a vat of brown sewage, he said, “No.”

But by the end, as we discussed septic tank emptying with his mother in their crowded but sociable wooden-housed compound near Siam Centre, Toey had seen the light. “I'll tell my neighbours not to use the illegal trucks (which dump the shit anywhere). But I don't think they'll listen.”

There was sidewalk-to-sidewalk-and traffic-light-to-traffic-light traffic on the main road at the end of Toey's soi. There were no taxis in sight. But there were half a dozen men in orange vests lounging on motorbikes. So I tried a motorbike taxi. (Look away now, mother.) I got on the back of the bike with some trepidation. But god, it's fun. Apart from ingesting all that pollution. But otherwise, when you're zooming along a canal, or nipping between stationary cars and trucks – suckers! – it's marvellous. I have never liked motorbikes, as the first time I tried to drive a moped, I drove it straight into a parked car, and as I know that doctors call motorbikes donorbikes because the riders conveniently die of head injuries, leaving salvageable organs, and since my sister and her boyfriend were driving from York to Leeds down a B road one day and watched a motorcyclist hit a small wall and go flying, and then watched him die in my sister's arms.

And all that still applies. But still. FUN.

Such fun that I paid the motorcyclist double. Then I reached my room and though I have been careful of checking my yogurt bottles for ants, I was so exhilarated (or lightheaded from lead) I forgot. I got a mouthful of ant protein.